WASHINGTON (voa) – Concerned that al-Qaida may have acquired nuclear materials, the Bush administration has reportedly deployed hundreds of sophisticated radiation sensors in the Washington area, along U.S. borders and abroad.
The Washington Post says the elite U.S. military commando unit, the Delta Force, has been ordered to kill or disable anyone with a suspected nuclear device. Scientists would be called in to disarm the weapon.
The newspaper says “the consensus government view” now is that al-Qaida likely would be able to build a so-called “dirty bomb” that uses conventional explosives to spread radioactive fallout over a wide area.
The Post report says the new radiation detection devices were in use last month during the winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and at the Super Bowl in New Orleans.
The newspaper also reported Sunday that some U.S. allies, including Saudi Arabia, have installed detectors after warnings from U.S. intelligence. The Post says officials believe al-Qaida may have gained access to weapons-grade radioactive material, or even a stolen Soviet-era nuclear warhead.
The head of Russia’s atomic safeguard agency, Colonel General Igor Valynkin, has said anyone who claims Russia has lost an intact nuclear bomb is, in his words, “barking mad.”
The Post says Washington is also concerned because a retired Pakistani nuclear scientist met twice with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. That scientist is now under house arrest in Pakistan.
U.S. officials fear the scientist, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, may have given nuclear secrets to the al-Qaida leader.
U.S. experts are said to believe that terrorists already possess lower-level radioactive materials, such as strontium-90 and cesium-137, which could be used together with conventional explosives to make a “dirty bomb.”
